Zeitgeist, Oregon

[Artemis]

You've been here before. This is the city you see behind your eyelids, the one you hear grinding like glass under your feet, and the one you can feel, like lips whispering secrets into your ear. You didn't really think this place was real, did you? But, it is real, as real as Chicago or Shanghai, Melbourne or Moscow. Its just that no one wants to admit it.

Frank ducked into a service alcove, pressing his back against the filthy graffiti brick, his chest heaving, his .38 special raised to his ear, empty now and useless except maybe as a talisman of protection. He dared not turn to see if the woman who had been following him was still there - he knew she was, anyway.

The train rushing past him nearly gave him a heart attack, the sound, light, and pressure seeming at first like the end of Frank's existence. For a crazy second, he was sure it was her... but it wasn't, thank God. It was just the 4:30 to Forevertown, and Frank couldn't help but smile. Anyone...anything, caught in front of the train would be so much lube for the wheel by now.

Then he felt the cold, slender fingertips caress his neck, and the passing train ripped his scream out of the air, never to be heard.

Sitting on the border of Oregon and California, less than a mile from the Pacific Ocean and running the entire length of the Rio Hierro, is a city whose existence no one can quite believe, nor can they deny. Here, the tallest buildings in the world part passing clouds like stones in a river, while mighty zeppelins, the last of their kind, ply their way between the iron and concrete towers. Bridges are strung between the towers like clothesline, and from these bridges sprout structures, some dipping all the way to the ground, some connecting to the skyscrapers through even more cobbled-together bridges, and some just hang precariously over the streets.

The girl was at least a decade younger than Consuela, but everything from the way she held her mug of tea to the way she examined the grain patterns in the wood table made her seem ancient. "I can only give advice," she said to Consuela. "I can't interfere. That's not my job."

"But surely you have that power," Consuela said, leaning forward, her nails digging into the table. "Everyone else who comes to you, they..." she wasn't sure what to say next, and the rosary hanging from her neck made the choice that much harder. She swallowed. "They say you're some kind of god. That you can help people."

"Well, I don't know," the girl said, smiling for a fraction of a second. "I can help you, Mrs. Dominguez, but I won't do it the way you think I should. I won't call down thunder or upturn the earth for you."

"Why...not?"

"Because," the girl said, looking her in the eyes for the first time since Consuela Dominguez had come to Nighthawk's Diner. "The kind of gods who do that require more payment than I can ask of you...or that you could ever really give. Now...would you like my advice, or not?"

Consuela, so sure that she had found a silver bullet, sighed, looked around the diner, and shook her head. Then, she picked up her purse, stood up from the booth she had been sitting at with the girl, and left."

This is a real, full city, complete with post offices, banks, Greyhound stations, major-league sports teams, and public schools. But that's only one side of things. In Zeitgeist, the mundane interacts with the fantastic so often and so intimately that terms like "mundane" and "fantastic" begin to lose their meaning. The Irish pubs cater to steel workers, college students, and off-duty cops, but it is also the meeting place of men with strange tattoos that seem to shift under the lights, and women who add herbs and liquids from vials kept under their hats into their drinks...or those of other patrons.

The stock exchanges are ruled by the suit-wearing sharks of the market, but they would be kidding themselves if they denied that strange things sometimes happen on the trading floor. Like how that rookie, Maloney or something, passed out on the floor, and while the EMTs were carrying him off, he muttered a string of digits, which turned out to be the peaks and valleys for the next month, perfect down to a penny. Or when the computers all crashed at once, and when the IT guys got them working again, they started flashing accounts that couldn't have been right...Jonesy looked into it later though, and it turns out those names, those numbers, and those takes...they were the last to pass through the New York exchange before the Crash.

Not even the suburbs are without their strange stories and urban myths. There is a hole in one the street of a once-burgeoning neighborhood, which is now all but abandoned. Every year, like clockwork, someone disappears down the hole. Sometimes a body is found. Sometimes. No one in the town of Bridgeport send their kids to school on the busses anymore, not since an entire bus full of children disappeared without a trace. Except for Emily Baur, that is, who showed up on her parent's doorstep half-starved, with sunken eyes and a deathly fear of the family dog, and with signs of severe frostbite...even though it was the middle of summer. The bus she had gotten on a week before, the other children on it, and the driver, were never seen again.

"Of course," Saul said, raised his wineglass and taking a polite sip of his host's burgundy. "It's a little more complicated than just buying out the tenament."

"I don't see how," Mr. Rodman said, looking out through the zeppelin's cabin windows at the threadbare, cobbled-together apartments and grocery stores of Bridge City. "The money we're offering, every one of those smog-rats could buy a home in New Bethlehem worth six times where they're living now."

"But New Bethlehem isn't their home," Saul said, keeping his tone diplomatic while promising himself not to resort to bullshit that would get him in trouble later. "And these people have lived their whole lives without more money than they need to pay rent and keep having babies. It would be like me offering you a thousand lobster dinners at once - you only need one, why would you want the other nine hundred and ninety nine?"

Rodman sighed. "Well," he said, sounding disappointed. "There are other ways to get rid of them."

Saul said nothing, only drank more of the wine, and looked out at the city as the sun began to disappear behind Century Spire.

Zeitgeist began as an attempt to create the Great American Future. It was supposed to be a city of flying cars, malls bigger than city blocks, ubiquitous police, and the grand, futuristic architecture that characterized the buildings of the 1950s and 60s. When that future did not come to pass, the grand buildings lay mostly uncompleted, yet inhabited, the sharp acute angles were ground down to awkward swooshes, the gleaming aluminum began to rust, and slowly, raygun-gothic was whittled down to just plain gothic.

The bridges overlap so much and the buildings are so tall that, except for a few minutes at high noon, there are parts of the city's heart that never see daylight, and are only lit by neon signs, sodium lightposts, and flashing police lights. Strange and tough things grow in darkness, and the citizens of Zeitgeist have adapted to this existence almost too quickly, almost too comfortably. Maybe that's why the people who live here find it that much easier to accept the stranger parts of their city...or even to embrace them.

Jae-Moon looked around the corridors and bike lanes of the Underground, pulled her hood forward to block the flashing light of a dying halogen bulb in the ceiling forty feet above her. From below, she could feel the rumble of trains, and from above she could hear the grinding of car traffic. She glanced down at the address written on the back of her hand, and followed the hand-made signs until she arrived at her destination.

It was barely a shack, big enough for two rooms and a bathroom, one of four dozen makeshift structures in this corner of the Underground, thrown together by those needing a warm, dry, relatively safe place to live...who knew how long ago? The city hadn't gotten around to demolishing them, and like a lot of things she'd seen so far in this city, the place seemed to be stronger than it looked simply for the fact that it still existed. She found the front door, a push-up like a garage door rather than a push-open, and inserted the key her grandmother had given her a year ago into the lock. It slid open.

"Hey," a voice said behind her. Jae-Moon turned slowly, her free hand reaching slowly for the collapsing baton on her pocket. "You're Ki-Sei's kid, aren't you?" The speaker was an old man, in a wheelchair that looked as old and home-made as the micro-houses around them.

"Her grand-daughter," she said. "She lived here?"

"Long...long time ago," the man said. He smiled, and began to wheel himself away. "Welcome home."

A map isn't nearly as useful as a guide, but at least a map won't lead you straight to a den of predators, human or otherwise.

The prostitute giving you her speech is beautiful, more than these streets deserve, but you've got to wonder, how does she stay that pretty in this piece of shit part of town, and why do her eyes keep slipping from your face down to your heart?

The cops here do their best, but its all they can do to keep the criminals from tearing the city apart at the seams, or from turning into a reflection of their own greed and gluttony. Fortunately, there are vigilantes that cops certainly don't endorse...but are happy to have around. Private detectives, neighborhood-watch groups, more-or-less altruistic street gangs, and individuals in masks and costumes straight out of comics keep watch on the streets, the tunnels, the bridges, and the towers.

This is a bad town. It's also a beautiful town. Terrible, sad, amazing, and secret things happen here. Stay a while, and you'll see some of them.

Stay too long, though, and you'll become one.

But then...maybe that's why you came here in the first place.

Welcome to Zeitgeist, Oregon. Enjoy your stay.

[Siege]

So, Zeitgeist returns, in a rather contemporary (ish) setting? That's sweet! I hope this does last longer than the last incarnation though . All the same, if the new version's got any more to do with people asking deities for favors in seedy diners, I'm sure to tune into this one...

[Artemis]

Yep - deciding to actually go through with this and make the place a universe once again took about four months of debating, but I think the kid's grown up enough now to release it into the woods with a Zippo lighter and a baseball bat. Part of that is exactly because it's in a contemporary, real-world setting, and the other part is because now I can focus all my attention on just making a single, albiet massive, city, rather than an entire planet.

Also, something we've talked about plenty before, Siege, the idea of letting the reader decide what exactly is going on in an article or story, that's gonna be at the forefront of this new incarnation of Zeitgeist - maybe this is just regular story about a big, weird, overgrown city, or maybe it's really dark science fiction like Dark City or The Matrix, or maybe it's urban fantasy - I'm honestly not sure myself.

One thing I am sure of is that this place has already taken up a permanent residency in my brain, the way Universal Constants has, and I definitely feel there's things I can say with this world that I can't, at least not without a lot of fancy footwork and illusion-magic, with UniCon.

[Artemis]

A very brief Dramatis Personae of some of the prime citizens of Zeitgeist.

Martha Cole - The ancient matriarch of Eidolon Enterprises, the company that built Zeitgeist from the ground up...and then abandoned it. She sits in the highest room of the highest building in the world, surrounded by machines, doctors, and odd trinkets that keep her body alive. How much power does she truly wield, and what does she plan to do with it?

The Indigo Spirit - A dashing urban rogue in a cloak and an opera mask. Some call him a vigilante, some call him a hero, others call him a menace. Some don't think he exists at all. Some wouldn't be alive if he didn't. What is his true identity, and what made him what he is? Where did his strange powers of the mind, body and spirit come from?

The Dream Girl - No one ever sees her quite the same way, or hears the same voice, or even smells the same perfume, but this girl with the wisdom of a goddess can always be found at the Nighthawks Diner, hanging from Bridge City tenuously above the streets of Zeitgeist. How long has she been here, and who is she really waiting for in that booth at Nighthawks?

Chi-yun Christos - She is the product of two lineages of great power, but this beautiful young capoeirista is determined to forge her own path in the city of eternal night. But the debts of her parents follow her wherever she goes, and sooner or later, she will have to face the destiny she never wanted. What path have her ancestors chosen her for?

The Men in the Camel Hair Dusters - No one knows what these figures are really up to, but whatever it is, they've been up to it since almost before Zeitgeist truly existed. Identified by their namesake long, tan coats and their pale, tattooed skin, some think they are vampires, ghosts, cyborgs, and stranger urban myths. Are they a force for good or ill for the city? Do their goals extend beyond Zeitgest?

The Beast at St. Christopher's - Those who have seen this terrifying creature can barely agree on what it looked like, much less what it is, but all reports agree that something prowls the roof and spires of the great St. Christopher's Cathedral. Could such a beast be real, and if so, what are its origins? Is it somehow connected with the slayings around the church, the ones marked in bloody graffiti "Slouching Toward Bethlehem" ?

Rocco Vinacetti - A middle-rung goodfella who has recently found himself in charge of the entire Syndicate effort in Zeitgeist. From his headquarters in the Underground, Rocco does his best to hold his own against the encroaching Kkangpae, the violent Russians, and the unpredicatable death rattle of the Cosa Nostra. Can he lead the Syndicate back to their former glory as master of the city?

[Siege]

The Men in the Camel Hair Dusters

Siege: I saw three of these dusters a short time ago, they were waiting for a train. Inside the dusters, there were three men.
Artemis: So?
Siege: Inside the men, there were three bullets.
Artemis: That's a crazy story, Siege, for two reasons. One, nobody around these part's got the guts to wear those dusters except those men. Two, the Men in Camel Hair Dusters don't get killed.



I like it!

[Ford Prefect]

Yeah, I'll say. Arty, you have reaffirmed, in my mind, your position as an astonishingly effective worldbuilder.

[Artemis]

Sorry about the long-ass delay, everyone. I should be getting my computer fixed and sent to me within a week or so, and I'll be able to write up some original stuff for Zeitgeist then.

[Artemis]

A Guided Tour
Boroughs and Neighborhoods of Zeitgeist

Aerodrome, a.k.a. ZIA

The Zeitgeist International Aerodrome is where the city’s fleet of zeppelins and dirigibles come to rest, as well as one of the world’s largest conventional airports. Located ten miles inland of the rest of Zeitgeist, it covers most of the Torrasque Mesa (a flat area at the very northern tip of the Sierra mountains, a mostly desert area) and is constantly competing with LAX and Sea-Tac for the title of busiest airport on the west coast. It is almost a little town unto itself, with a collection of trailer parks and cheap motels setting up at the bottom of the mesa.

The ‘Burbs

There are two suburban towns to Zeitgest. The much older one, San Marco, California, is where most of the middle-class people like to live, the ones that just work in Zeitgeist but do not, for good reason, live there. It’s a nice place, all told - lots of parks, near the beach, two fair-to-middling school districts (one public and one private Catholic), and a gated community called Redwood Estates. To the south of San Marco are a few vineyards and apple orchards, which brings in a good amount of revenue for the city. San Marco is actually probably the nicest place in Zeitgeist. Which isn’t to say it doesn’t have its problems - a few of the town’s prominent citizens, including the mayor, the principals of both high schools, and the manager of the local Eidolon office, all have loose but tangible ties to organized crime in Zeitgeist. It is also suffering from the housing woes of the rest of the country, and a lot more people than anyone wants to admit are being dumped back into Zeitgeist as they can no longer afford their houses and condos.

Salia, Oregon, is a very different place. Built in the 1960s as a company town for Eidolon Construction (before the company went public and changed their name to Eidolon Enterprises), Salia has fallen on many of the same hard times as Zeitgeist itself. The natural gas plant that powered the city went up in an explosion in 1983, killing more than two hundred people, and disaster relief was so sluggish in the area that Salia still hasn’t completely recovered. This is where the few blue collar workers who can afford to make it out of Zeitgeist come to live, but it is also rapidly turning into a ghost town - literally. Urban legends of haunted houses and stranger things near the site of the power plant explosion make certain parts of Salia untouchable, as far as its citizens are concerned.

Business District

If any part of Zeitgeist can be described as being comparable to other cities, the Business District is it. This is the banking, shopping, and technological capital of Zeitgeist, and all things considered it isn’t terribly weird. The buildings are tall, but not any taller than they are in New York City; the lights are bright, but not any brighter than the ones in Shanghai. While the headquarters for a lot of the major corporations might be in the more-famous Forevertown borough, most of the actual business takes place in, naturally enough, the Business District. It is the most complete-looking part of the city, with most of its buildings less than twenty years old, and it boasts a number of nice mid-to-high-price apartments and condos, where the business folk of Zeitgeist live.

Bridge City

There are five bridges that run across the Rio Hierro, and four of them have more than one level to them, connecting the skyscrapers to one another across massive skywalks and elevated rail lines. These bridges are so huge that in the 1970s, in the never-ending search for living room in Zeitgeist, people started tying, carving, and welding homes to the bridges. While no one is allowed to live here legally, the Zeitgeist Police Department and city officials have much bigger fish to fry, and as long as they’re not actually damaging the bridges or impeding passage, the people who live in, on, or under Bridge City usually aren’t bothered. The neighborhood has taken on a lot of people who would otherwise be homeless, and a real community has sprung up here, complete with markets and shops, wind-trap power plants, ladders and catwalks to connect the bridges, and even hanging gardens that have become something of a symbol of Zeitgeist’s still-attainable prosperity. This is the bachelor, artist, and gray market part of the city.

Of course, there is also a criminal element here. Plenty of people who don’t want to be found by the cops or any of the other authorities in Zeitgeist make their home in Bridge City, and they bring their problems with them. A few places are owned by gangsters who have carved out their little kingdoms in the sky, and will go so far as to enslave the citizens of Bridge City to carry out their goals, whatever those may be.

Carnaval

Once, the neighborhood called Carnaval was meant to be just that, a carnival grounds that might have one day played host to the World’s Fair. However, like most of Zeitgeist, it was never fully completed, and all of the festival people have either dried up or moved on, leaving the area to be inhabited by homeless and gangs. In the last decade the city has made inroads to reclaiming Carnaval, hoping to use the wasting land as residential housing, and if anything Carnaval is even more decrepit, as half of it has seen the wrecking ball the past eight years.

However, three areas have stubbornly stuck out as places that are not going away anytime soon. The Valley, in reality an artificial trench built as part of an abandoned roller coaster, is home to a group of youth vagabonds that rarely venture outside their territory, but will ruthlessly defend against any incursion, be it from gangs or city officials. Strangely enough, no one in the Valley seems to be above the age of 14.

The Silver Torus, which was the world’s largest ferris wheel at the time of its construction, actually still has power and still spins, though it never stops to let anyone on. No one is entirely sure who keeps the Torus running, and for what reason. It is still lit with bright green and white lights, and is the only artificial light in the otherwise pitch-black neighborhood come night.

The last area is the Zeitgeist Public Zoo, which was abandoned in 1994 after decades of volunteer service caring for the animals. Gang violence and costs simply drove out all but the most diehard of caretakers, who live in the zoo itself now. The last fourteen years have not been kind to the place or its inhabitants, human or animal. The caretakers don’t go back into the rest of the city anymore, and those who see them have described them as “feral,” perhaps a result of living among beasts for so long. When angered, these people are just as dangerous as any gang - or pack of animals.

Dock Districts/Riverfront

The Rio Hierro, or the Iron River, runs from the Pacific coast to more than forty miles inland, cutting right through the middle of Zeitgeist. The Dock Districts follow the Rio Hierro’s path from the coast to the city limits, and are built up entirely of seaport land. Naturally, this is where a lot of the city’s money comes in, legal or otherwise. Where the docks don’t cover, the Riverfront does. The Riverfront neighborhood draws a very particular kind of citizen - it’s too expensive for bachelors, but too edgy for most prosperity-seeking citizens. As a result, it is home to mix of crime lords, artists and journalists, and wealthy eccentrics. The Riverfront has a very strong air of mystique about it, with its distinctive Salish-derived architecture, cobblestones and gas lamps left over from when the city was still Los Noches Constante, and the boathouses that the freighters and barges share the Rio Hierro with.

The Riverfront is where most of the bars, pubs and taverns in Zeitgeist are located, some of them actually located on floating piers tied to the docks. It is also a popular area for drug deals, smuggling operations, and prostitution, making it the natural target of ZPD’s Vice Squad. Therefore, a lot of gunfights erupt on the Riverfront, and it is largely known as a “cop killer” neighborhood. It is also the most popular suicide location in the city per capita, recently replacing Bridge City in 2005.

Forevertown

This is where people think of when they think of Zeitgeist. This is where the Five Towers (the five largest buildings in the world - the Century Spire, Eidolon Tower, the twin Gibson Towers, and the Zeitgeist Obelisk) are, where the city’s famous mixture of neo-gothic, art-deco, postmodern and raygun-gothic architecture is strongest, and where the true seats of power in Zeitgeist are. This is the headquarters of Eidolon Enterprises; the bulk of the University of Oregon, Zeitgeist (Oz University, as the students call it) campus; and the hub of the city’s massive sky bridge and elevated rail line system. It is between the dozens of skyscrapers that Forevertown’s fleet of dirigible transports float and alight. It is from here that the bulk of light comes when night falls over the city - from billboards more than a hundred stories high to the running lights of dirigibles and helicopters, even the black buildings of this borough are bathed in neon and florescent light. Which, of course, only makes the shadows deeper and blacker.

Century Spire is an art-deco masterpiece, described as a melding of the Chrysler Building and Epcot at Disneyland. It is the tallest building in the world, fifty feet higher than Eidolon Tower, and if and when it is completed is will stand at least forty feet higher than that. However, the top ten stories are uninhabited, as proper utilities have yet to be installed. It is home to some of the most powerful businesses in Zeitgeist, and its foundation extends down into the Underground to help support its massive base. Secondary towers and structures stick out like cactus buds, and the highest levels serve as a docking station for zeppelins. Aerodynamic panels dot the surface of the building, letting air pass over smoothly rather than slam up against the windows and fatigue the building’s structure. Century Spire is considered the original cloud-ripper building, for the way that low-hanging clouds are actually split in two when they run into Century Spire.

Eidolon Tower is completed, though it only became so in 2002, thirty years after initial construction. It is an ellipsoid building, like a dome that has been extremely stretched into a near-pyramid. It is a sleek, modern-looking building of tinted glass and aluminum. This is, of course, the headquarters of Eidolon Enterprises, the company responsible for nearly all the building contract work in Zeitgeist.

The Gibson Towers are the epitome of raygun-gothic architecture, with their bright red and gold paint and sharp, acute angles. These are mostly technology-centered buildings, dominated by computer companies such as Westland Systems and Butler Cybernetics. The labs at the bottom floors are rented out to independent inventors and researchers, who rarely hold them for longer than a few months.

The Zeitgeist Obelisk is a neo-gothic structure built as an administrative building that could look out over Zeitgeist rather than be hidden away on Horizon Island. Its secondary purpose is the police headquarters, city morgue, and forensics lab; it is also home to Coster Hospital, a smaller medical center than Santa Theresa, but closer to the hub of the city and with a less-spooky reputation.

Horizon Island

In the middle of the Rio Hierro sits Horizon Island, a long strip of land less than half a mile wide but six miles long. It is here that the mayor’s office, city council, and the county courthouse, are located. Most of the island has remained heavily forested, though the trees are looking noticeably weaker from lack of sufficient sunlight, blocked out as they are by the cloud-ripping towers of Forevertown and the Business District. There used to be a high-security prison on Horizon Island as well, but it is now a dormitory for the University of Oregon Zeitgest campus.

Little Korea

Just outside the Business District, this area used to be known as the Mill Works, before the massive influx of Korean immigrants in the 1970s made this part of Zeitgeist their home. Little Korea is a very densely-packed, colorful part of town that has managed something of a reputation as a place where strange and wonderful things happen, similar to Chinatown in San Francisco. As much as the inhabitants of this district would like to dismiss this claim, mostly to stop the nosy tourists, strange stories do indeed persist in this part of the city. Most, however, still consider Little Korea to be a very nice place to live and shop, with the many independent shops and markets in this part of town. However, Little Korea also has its problems - there are a lot of Kkangpae (Korean gangsters) that live in Little Korea, and many of them have the backing of the Korean mob. It is also the city’s largest Red Light District, with most of the prostitution being run by the Kkangpae and other small independent organizations.

Growing up to the north of Little Korea is another ethnic town, typically called Amazonia or Little Brazil. However, the area is not large enough to be considered a neighborhood on its own, and most people just consider it an odd part of Little Korea.

Old Town

The town center of old Los Noches Constante is located here, and so are most of the old buildings that survived the growth and expansion of Zeitgeist. The area has been repurposed as a relatively safe part of town, and this is where most of the city’s private schools are located. Many mid-rent apartments are also located here, making it one of the most comfortably populated residential areas in Zeitgeist. It is also, however, in great need of renovation, specifically the road system - there are parts in Old Town where the streets have cracks in them so wide and so deep that a person can fall through and not be found for days. It was likely the tunneling to build the Underground that did this, but none of the subway or foot tunnels were ever completed under Old Town, so there are simply bleeding gaps that lead to no-one-really-knows. Every year, at least six students are lost in these cracks in the street, never to be found again.

New Bethlehem

This is where much of the city’s hispanic and Salish inhabitants live, in a sprawl of simple single-story buildings. It is, by area, the largest residential district in Zeitgeist, but many of the buildings are uninhabited and/or condemned. It also has the largest concentration of consecrated ground in the city, from Catholic churches to re-instated Salish holy sites, and a fair handful of Buddhist shrines, mosques, and synagogues. It was described once as being the town where “it’s always the night before Christmas, but morning never comes.” On a grimmer note, New Bethlehem was also the stalking grounds of Juan Blanco, a serial killer who took the lives of more than twenty children, two women, seven dogs, and two private detectives before finally being killed in a shootout with Zeitgeist police in 1999. Some say his ghost still haunts the houses of the people he murdered.

New Bethlehem is also home to the new Santa Theresa Medical Center, widely thought to be one of the best hospitals and medical research institutes in the United States. It has brought an unheard-of prosperity to the neighborhood, providing jobs and charity organizations to the people who live here. Already much of New Bethlehem is being revitalized. However, Santa Theresa also has a nasty reputation for losing patients - literally disappearing when left alone, if only for a few minutes. There are also rumors of the hospital’s blood bank constantly needing to be refilled.

Other famous buildings include St. Christopher’s Cathedral, a beautiful neo-gothic cathedral built on the grave site of Padre Tomas Elmo Sarique, the traveling Mexican priest who predicted the town’s nocturnal fate and gave it the name Los Noches Constante. It is one of the largest churches in the United States, and is also the place of some unsettling occurrences. Parishioners have reported seeing an inhumanly tall being with red skin and the head of a dog lurking amidst the spires and towers of the cathedral, and an ex-priest who worked in the cathedral claimed he left because the catacombs under St. Christopher’s led “somewhere dark and Godless.”

Underground

The vast subway, foot tunnel, and urban subterranean dwelling system known collectively as the Zeitgeist Underground has two very different reputations. Some see it as being the best thing that’s happened to Zeitgeist, a unified mass transit system that can do away with the rickety and crime-ridden bridges and streets, and finally allow the city a bit of breathing room. On the other hand, some call it an emblem of all that is wrong with Zeitgeist, specifically the fact that even after twenty years of construction, the Underground is not even half finished with its projected plan by this time. Instead, what has been completed has been modified greatly - besides a subway system, the Underground has also become home to a shopping mall, a low-rent residential area, and its very own police precinct and school district. The central hubs of the Underground are considered some of the safest part of Zeitgeist, provided they are entered via safe ports on the surface.

Deeptown

Officially, there is no Deeptown. However, everyone from Forevertown to Salia has heard stories, about parts of the Underground that lead off into places that weren’t built by the city planners; about subway trains that have been misdirected into strange tunnels and never seen or heard from again; about how the reason there aren’t any homeless people living in the Underground is because someone, or something, comes and takes them away. No one knows for sure, though, because no one wants to go near the places where the Underground is supposed to turn into Deeptown.